Alberto Giacometti

Giacometti, Alberto

(älbĕr`tō jäkōmĕt`tē), 1901–66, Swiss sculptor and painter; son of the impressionist painter Giovannia Giacometti; b. Stampa. He settled in Paris in 1922, studying with BourdelleBourdelle, Émile Antoine, 1861–1929, French sculptor; son of a cabinetmaker of Montauban. He went to Paris in 1884, where he studied successively under Falguière, Dalou, and Rodin......Click the link for more information. and becoming associated first with the cubists and then the surrealists (see cubismcubism,art movement, primarily in painting, originating in Paris c.1907. Cubist Theory

Cubism began as an intellectual revolt against the artistic expression of previous eras......Click the link for more information.; surrealismsurrealism, literary and art movement influenced by Freudianism and dedicated to the expression of imagination as revealed in dreams, free of the conscious control of reason and free of convention......Click the link for more information.). His Slaughtered Woman (1932; Mus. of Modern Art, New York City), for example, is a violent surrealist work. Giacometti abandoned surrealist images in 1935. In the 1930s and thereafter, he created highly original sculptures of elongated, emaciated human figures, usually in bronze. He also made open cagelike structures (e.g., The Palace at 4 AM, 1933; Mus. of Modern Art, New York City) that were equally powerful.

Giacometti's haunting, anguished images have been described as perfect expressions of existentialist pessimism. In the early 1940s he created works on a drastically reduced scale. In his later years he again formed tall, slender, roughly worked figures that are among his most impressive sculptures. In his mature work, he concentrated on three basic themes for his attenuated figures—the seated portrait, the walking man, and the standing female nude, the latter two often with tiny shrunken heads and enormous, rooted feet. Giacometti's imagery and his plastic technique have had an extensive influence on modern sculpture. Many of his oil paintings and drawings, notably his portraits with their delicate, weblike tangle of lines, are also works of great distinction.

Bibliography

Giacometti, Alberto

Born Oct. 10, 1901, in Stampa; died Jan. 11, 1966, in Chur. Swiss sculptor and painter.

Giacometti studied at the Ecole des Arts et Metiers in Geneva from 1919 to 1920 and at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumiere in Paris under E. A. Bourdelle from 1922 to 1925. Experimenting initially with cubism, he was influenced by surrealism between 1929 and 1935. Giacometti is best known for his works executed from 1940 to 1960. These include extremely thin elongated sculptured figures bordering on the irrational (for example, City Square, 1948-49, bronze, Public Art Collection, Basel), rough-textured busts, oil and graphic portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. The spiritual loneliness of man in a bourgeois world is distinctly conveyed by the tragic solitude of Giacomettïs images.

In sum, 13 sculptures and drawings from Zurich's Alberto Giacometti Stiftung found their way into Berlin's permanent Egyptian collection, where they set in motion a dialogue spanning thousands of years.

There is little doubt that Alberto Giacometti was regarded as one of the most impressive juveniles from the O'Brien stable last season and he was marked down as a champion of the future when he won the Criterium de Saint Cloud back in November on only his second start.

Through January 15, Celebrating Modern Art: The Anderson Collection will fill three floors of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art with sculptures, works on paper such as David Hockney's Sprungbrett mit Schatten (a pigmented paper image drawn with a turkey baster), and paintings by the likes of Alberto Giacometti, Susan Rothenberg, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock.

As the character Robert Jones says in one of his never-to-be-sent letters to the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, "When you turn from the model to shape a portrait or clay figure, it's memory and habit, not sight, that guide your hand.

On the basis of insight similarly intuited and revealing, Louis Martz shows parallels in the treatment of suffering in the work of Herbert and Proust and in the use of ambiguity in Herbert's poetry and in The Invisible Object, a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti.

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